ER Talk
ER Talks are podcasts made by Piecewise at various points. They consist in part or in whole of Piecewise answering player-submitted questions. ER Talk 1 Download Link The transcript currently only goes to 11:22. For the other ~2 hours, you'll have to wait or listen to the sound file. "So… welcome to the first edition of ER Talk, it may be the only edition… uhm, I’m running on five hours of sleep, I’m recording into a fairly bad microphone, uh, it seems like the best time to do this, high quality action here. So I’m just going to start at the top of the questions I have and go down, I’ll skip them if I get any, you know, duplicates. So, the first one’s from anailater, and he asks “How long a day do you spend on this game?” Uh, that depends on your definition of ‘how long’, uhm, and it also depends on the day, really. I mean, most of the time I don’t spend that long a day on here, I just like doing real hard work I’ll probably be thinking about it off and on most of the day, but uhm, when it comes to a normal day, I maybe spend about two hours a day on this, uh, that’s just for doing the posts, though. Uhm, between missions, when I’m getting the next mission set up I could spend much longer than that depending on how long it takes me to set up the mission, uh, I could spend more than that if I have more free time and I want to do several posts a day. I can’t really do that now with the 20 man missions because then everyone will get left behind but, you know how that goes. Uhm, this next question is “How long does it take to make a turn?” and that really depends on how focused I am. Uh, if I’m sitting here doing a turn, just like sitting at a desk, focusing on nothing but that, and I can stop myself from, you know, fucking around on the Internet, or watching TV, or otherwise distracting myself, it doesn’t take terribly long, uhm, the most recent mission has actually taken much longer, because I have to sit there, and stick you all into your teams, which isn’t too much of a problem if there’s less than 25 posts on that page, but if there’s more than I have to, you know, quote, put it in, copy paste, go back out into the actual thread and you know, keep going back and forth. Uhm, so that takes a while, it’s not hard, it’s just you know, it takes a while. I would say about, uhm, all of my posts I make in the forums – that is, Perplexicon, uhm, and both ER threads take maybe about an hour and a half, two hours depending on circumstance; I’ve had it take much longer because, you know, watching TV, but, that’s about it. Uhm, and “If we were to take over the ship, would the game finish, or would it keep going?” It would keep going, uhm, the game is really more dictated by the universe events, and that should be something that a lot of people should have found out by now, that you guys aren’t the center of the universe, and this, the universe will keep going regardless of your actions, it’ll change, be affected by your actions, but it’ll keep going. Uhm, that’s kind of the ethos there of having you be connected to things, but not actually be the cause or the drive of things. Next question comes from Unholy_Pariah, who says “I gotta know, what’s the source of inspiration for the Altered?” Uhm, you’re gonna believe I’m lying, here, because when I actually thought about this question, I thought ‘Oh, shit, there’s a lot of stuff like this’, uhm, there’s the Tyranids, I believe they’re called, from Warhammer, there’s the, uh, whatever-they-are, the space zombies from Dead Space, there’s the Flood from Halo, there’s all these, sort of galactic evil gooey people who, uhm, yeah. Yeah, none of those actually, none of those are actually inspiration, at least not in a conscious manner. I guess I was just thinking, uhm, and I can’t… oh, I can’t spoil myself here, but uhm, a lot of the design of them came from, this, this sort of problem I had with those other, you know, gooey space zombie people, in that they never seemed like much of a threat to me. A good example would be like, the Flood from Halo, they never had their own ships, that I remember vaguely off of playing Halo however many years ago that was, they never had their own ships, they just kind of hijacked ships that were around at the time, so I wanted something that was, this sort of biological, living virus-thing that was, like, sort of like the Thing from the movie “The Thing”, Jesus Christ I’m saying ‘thing’ a lot. Uhm, but, something that was biological, but like purely biological, but also capable of moving through space, and capable of being an actual threat to a heavily civilized, and heavily technologically advanced group of people, ie; humans at this time period. So, that was essentially it, and it branched off there, and of course they’re using my, my what I’m sure some people have found what with Toaster, uh playing both games and saying ‘I’m sure there’s a word for flesh’ in Perplexicon, what people who have more than likely found out, of my kind of obsession with weird, fleshy abominations, it all sprung from that. So, if you’re wondering, uhm, go back to the goddamn question, if you’re wondering if they were inspired by any specific, uh, famous literature or game or from some sort of anime somewhere, they really weren’t. Uhm, it’s only in hindsight that I look back, and say ‘Oh…’ Alright. And now we move on to PyroDesu’s, uhm, whose avatar I’ve never quite been able to tell what is, it looks like a very old picture but he also has, like, weird, semi-imposed green-red chimp eyes and headsets, oh whatever. Uhm, so, PyroDesu asks a lot of the sort of standardized ones, “What was your main inspiration for the game?” And, that’s a bit difficult because, when you say ‘main inspiration for the game’, it’s broken down into several pieces. Uhm, one of my main, I’ll just go through them all. The thing that inspired me to make the game, more than the universe, or, I should say, made me decide to make the game uh, Roll to Dodge was uh, Deviation-22. Uhm, because I, I got into the forum here a little while ago, and I was just kinda scanning through looking for something that looked interesting and I read, I didn’t read much of Deviation-22, uhm, I read up to, I think like them just landing, and starting their quest in earnest, getting past the, uhm, the little tutorial area, but it, the thing that made me see how Roll to Dodges play, and made me see that I could run a game like this and it seemed like the best format for me. Uhm, when it comes to that initial thing which gave me the idea for this game, that is actually a roguelike, that uhm, probably no one’s ever played, called GatewayRL, that is uhm, supposedly inspired by one of the other inspirations for this game, which is, uhm, the book Roadside Picnic. Now, GatewayRL was a roguelike that I don’t think was ever really finished, uhm, and, in reality it’s, it’s gameplay is kind of like, very simple, sort of non-existent, but what it was, you start in a bar, and you have only a couple options, you can keep drinking, or you can get in a plane, or on a flight, they don’t really say what you’re flying on, and go to an alienesque like, zone of exclusion sort of area, kinda like in Stalker, and, get yourself some artifacts, and run, try to get enough artifacts to, you know, run back to the plane and get paid and drink some more. And, uhm, what struck me about that was not only were the environments incredibly hostile, and everything wanted to kill you, but, you had these AI companions, or not really companions they were just other people on the ship, and they would immediately sprint off in other directions and get killed by environmental hazards, so I thought, something where you were put into similar situations like this with several other players could be interesting. And that’s really the spark that started the, uhm, the actual concept for the game itself. Uhm, and actually one of the inspirations for GatewayRL and one of the inspirations for this game is the book Roadside Picnic, which some of you may know is the book that, uhm, inspired the Stalker movie and the Stalker book, and the Stalker game, vaguely. They’re kind of the, uhm Roadside Picnic is based on Aliens, on Alien stuff rather than Chernobyl. And Roadside Picnic is all about these people who go into these, this area where aliens have landed and everything’s all weird and screwed up, and there are these very, kind of sort of like hostile, uh, I don’t know what you’d call them, anomalous things. And they go in there and they get them and they take bring them back out and they get paid for them or, they get them for a scientific institute is what they’re supposed to be doing. Uhm, but really they’re selling a lot of them on the black market. And, that one, was an inspiration not only in the general you know, go in and get stuff come out, but also in the ethos of, uhm, I wonder if ethos if the right word, heh. Uhm, but also in the general concept of how they handle the aliens, like they handle the aliens and their artifacts. And they handle them in that these things that are to us are magical or so like, they’re so high-tech that we can’t even comprehend what they do or what they are, are just kind of discarded trash from aliens. Like, the aliens landed here and kind of discarded this trash as you would discard napkins or plastic silverware" ER Talk 2 Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ER Talk 3 Download Link ER Talk 4 Download Link Late night rambling Download Link ER Talk 5 AKA number whatever I'm tired. Question start post: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=137514.msg6140351#msg6140351 ER talk download post: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=137514.msg6383691#msg6383691 Download Link ER Talk 6 Download Link ER Talk 78 Download Link Category:Background